End Summer Internships… Now

Read this article and thought, yes, he’s right, which is surprising as it was written, quite cogently, by an Ad-guy!

I’m not so enthusiastic about the central thesis that when hiring new grads academic performance is a poor predictor of success. And that by just aiming for top grads inflates their demands while not guaranteeing performance success. This is plainly common since, and because of that quite uncommon.

More presciently, Sutherland (Ogilvy UK) notes that vacation internships are a complete waste of time. He suggests sending him a litre of Tanquery and he’ll say your child worked for him, freeing them to have some real “experience”… he suggests dope smoking in Goa, which is so 20th Century. Surely life experience is better than being cooped up in a photocopy room scanning files?

The brief internship has now escalated into a must-have on fresh grads c.v.’s, more’s the pity. We used to get hundreds of requests from students and their parents requesting for internships, which did little for them and less for us. It reinforced class-divides that universities fought hard to break. And delivered little value. It took up time to set them up, and oversee them and just as they got the hang of the job, and eliminated all the rework for us… they were off… maybe onto another internship.

Let’s forget the internship, permit the young a little fun with their youth, and we’ll have better team members for it.

And if your progeny really does need an internship, I’ll make a similar offer litre of Tanquery for the best intern recommendation ever, so long as the progeny gets some real experience.

you are right on this, this approach had completely escaped me – if you are intending on hiring young talent, having them work as an intern if a great approach. You get to see them perform live, and assess their suitability and cultural fit.